Secluded Cove - Stylized Environment

NateMasterFlash

Hey Polycounters.  I'm starting a new environment.

I have a few goals with this project: to better understand PBR pipeline and techniques, improve my sculpting ability, and add more material types to my portfolio.

I painted this concept in the summer during one of the Hand Painters Guild workshops.  The layout will change,  I'm doing a paintover of the blockout to help plan more of the scene out.

Mood board

Blockout

Sky and water are stock UE4 content currently.  Lighting is kinda weird right now, I started from the first person BP and there is extra light that I'm having trouble controlling at the moment.

Thanks for looking!

NateMasterFlash

Rock sculpts, feedback more than welcome.  Will add some rock reference to my moodboard when I'm ready to do another sculpt pass.  The meshes that are currently in the scene are just decimated and UVed.  Mostly a POC to see how well the bakes would turn out.

gsokol

Very nice!  Loving the comp so far.  Sculpts look nice too.  I think you did a good job of defining shapes without going too far with micro details.

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses!

NateMasterFlash

@gsokol Thanks!

Little paintover.  Just trying to feel some design decisions out.

NateMasterFlash

Some updates.  Improved the water, I think the lighting is getting better.   Tried making a blobby cloud shape with some whispy bits.  Going to give them another shot with simpler shapes.  

Thanks for looking.

NateMasterFlash

Sculpts!

NateMasterFlash

Little update in engine.  No new meshes yet.  Playing with the atmosphere and water,

NateMasterFlash

Foliage started.  Will make the leaves smaller on the next pass.

NateMasterFlash

I've been hoarding my updates.  Working on my foliage and trying to make it look as awesome as possible.  I've got a test bake of the tree trunk sculpt.  The limbs and branches are separate so I can use the trunk as a dead variation.  

NateMasterFlash

Starting to get some decent bakes going!

NateMasterFlash

Changed my trees to blueprints for future modularity purposes and to simplify lighting.  Foliage is still rough.  Debating creating a blueprint or emitter to populate the clouds and make them move.

NateMasterFlash

Working on that foliage.  Need to place more branches and leaves.  Have a little extra space in the texture that I can use for more leaves or possibly vines. 

Bedrock

Nice work so far! I would double check the scale so far, the leafs and the fireplace especially look too big whilst the "doors" on the ship look tiny in comparison.

JunkieKong

Hey, this is looking cool - I'm glad that you decided not to go with purple leaves on purple water, because that was hard to read, however the green isn't really doing it for me. Maybe try something more orange/reddish for the leaves. Another thing I'll mention is that a lot of the textures especially those granite looking rocks, seem to have pretty noisy surface details - I'd wind it back, but maybe that's just me.
Anyway I'm looking forward to the end result - you should experiment with some coloured spec maps on these assets, could create an interesting surreal look.

NateMasterFlash

@Bedrock Thanks! Good call on the scale.

@JunkieKong Thank you!  Good idea about the leaves, I was having similar thoughts.  I agree about the noisy details overall.  Slight byproduct of being a Substance noob but I will be trying to address that.

Trying some different colors for the leaves.  Made a material instance to be able to change the colors easier.  

Rock material is under heavy reconstruction.  Need to do a little research and update all of the meshes.

FreneticPonies

I like the dark green leaves the best, gives a very different color to the rest of the dark purple/brown in the scene without sticking out like the bright green leaves do. Great job! Looks like a stylized adventure game to me.

JunkieKong

Yeah this is coming along nicely - I think my preference would be the colours in the second image. My next thing to consider would be to make that shipwreck stand out from the tree its next to, maybe experiment with the lighting and texture values. Could be worth making one of these renders grayscale so you can really read the values and quickly muck about with it in photoshop.

NateMasterFlash

@FreneticPonies Thank you!

@JunkieKong Good points about the values.  I haven't really touched the boat yet but I will keep that in mind to separate it when I start working on it.  I'll go ahead at adjust some mats in engine in the meantime.


Bunch of progress shots.

Stumbled across a nice substance tutorial.  My result is pretty close the the base tutorial.  Going to expand on it and try and add some different rock layers.  I'm using world aligned textures for all the rocks and don't feel like this material is as effective on the top.  I'm also thinking about trashing my current rock statics and modeling some simpler shapes to let the material do more work.

Also have been messing with lighting and layout here and there.  Trying to get closer to my mood board and improve the composition.

Thanks for looking!

New material, I didn't stick with blue.

NateMasterFlash

Updates!

Started adding vertex painting functionality to the rock material.  
Trying to do something similar to the dead growth in the image below.

Filipe

I like it!

NateMasterFlash

@Filipe Thanks!

Texture blending in.  I'm blending with a random placeholder texture currently, making some sort of moss soon.

NateMasterFlash

First pass on the moss texture. Need to do more shader work.  Have stuff to clean up/change because of the new material.

NateMasterFlash

Testing out some shrubby type foliage and some dead trees.  Materials on both are temporary.  Managed to reduce the harshness of the shadows as well.

NateMasterFlash

Spent some time on my landscape material and worked on a mud texture.  My layer blends are set to height now so I've got some better blending but I'm sure they will need more tweaking.

NateMasterFlash

Trying to make some stylized particles for the campfire.  I currently don't have emmisive on the smoke material in hopes of getting a little bit of shadow on the underside and to pick up light from the campfire. 

Round smoke.

Hard edgy smoke.

NateMasterFlash

Working on improving the composition.  Started making more vegetation.

NateMasterFlash

Went back to optimize some meshes.  Ended up pushing the small trees to something a little more stylized.

NateMasterFlash

Making progress with the foliage.  This texture seems more effective on the medium sized trees than the small. Going to create another texture that isn't quite and dense for the small trees.

NateMasterFlash

Making progress on the foliage.  Trying to figure out how to improve the shading.  I already projected normals on the floating geo from the shape underneath them.

Tangent space normals enabled.

Tangent space normals disabled.

NateMasterFlash

Figured out the lighting issue.  Mostly just iterating on the foliage.

NateMasterFlash

Workin on the grass and landscape materials.